Giovanni Francesco da Rimini, The Virgin and Child with Two Angels

The naked Christ Child stands on a marble ledge, his toes poking forwards over its edge. He looks up adoringly at his mother, the Virgin Mary, and tenderly grasps her thumb with one hand.

The Virgin herself, a rather cool blonde with pale grey, unfocused eyes and a long nose, stands in a strangely claustrophobic classical space. She is framed by an arch, which rises from two columns standing on the parapet. Behind her is a curved stone wall; two haloed heads, presumably of angels, peer over it. Although not crowned – her hair is covered with a short veil, apparently pinned above her right ear – she is magnificently dressed: her blue cloak is trimmed with a broad band set with pearls and interlined with green. It falls in folds onto the shelf in front of her.

The artist, Giovanni Francesco da Rimini, has inscribed his name in Latin and the date, 1461, on the front of the marble parapet. He worked in Padua among other places, and was clearly heavily influenced by the painter Squarcione who ran a painting school there. The naked child on the ledge, the peculiar pop-eyed appearances and the fair, frosty Virgin all appear in Squarcione’s single surviving painting (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin). Like his contemporary Giorgio Schiavone, da Rimini was clearly fascinated by classical forms, perhaps without fully understanding them.

The idea of showing the Virgin in an architectural frame has echoes of contemporary paintings showing her at a window, like The Virgin and Child by Dirk Bouts. These have connotations of how medieval kings and queens would have shown themselves to the public.